First let me address the general topic of the conspiracy theories that have been flying around ever since the Las Vegas killings.
I think that in a way the talk is understandable. After all, nature abhors a vacuum, and at the moment Paddock’s motives are virtually unknown. So perhaps one of these conspiracy theories will even turn out to be true. At this point we have so little evidence of Paddock’s motives that we cannot rule such theories out, although I strongly suspect they will remain in the fantasy realm.
But lack of evidence, or even the existence of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, does not stop conspiracy buffs who look for it—and think they’ve found it—nearly everywhere. With Paddock, there probably will always be big holes in our knowledge. In fact, I have come to conceptualize Stephen Paddock as the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 of mass murderers. That’s the flight whose demise was recently, three years after the plane went down, declared by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau report to have been “almost inconceivable” in its mystery.
Although so far Paddock’s motivation has been almost equally mysterious, it is not inconceivable. In fact, lots of people are guessing at the motive or motives (as I did yesterday and will continue to do today).
For example, a great many people have wondered why Paddock might have chosen the country music festival for his carnage. Generally, people seem to believe there must have been some ideological reason. And his actions definitely seem to have been long-planned, and therefore premeditated. But I believe that although Paddock planned his attack quite meticulously, the details of exactly which venue he would end up attacking were decided somewhat late in the game. I believe that the festival was a target of both opportunity and planning—planning for its general outlines, opportunity for the specific event.
In other words, I believe that Paddock’s basic motive was to kill a lot of people and then kill himself (something I wrote about yesterday). It almost didn’t matter to him who those people would be, as long as there were a lot of them. I believe he had decided that a good way to maximize his kill number would be to use high-powered and speedy firearms, have lots of ammunition handy, and to fire from a difficult-to-detect and protected perch up high into a very dense crowd.
Paddock frequently stayed in Vegas hotels. He was well-known there and the casinos liked his business; among other things (according to his brother) he was a very lavish tipper. Therefore he would have known a lot about the Mandalay and its rooms and the view from different rooms both in that hotel and others. He would also have known when and where open-air concerts were scheduled, and the best vantage points from which to kill people at the venues.
I believe Paddock decided a while ago—most likely a few months ago, when he reportedly bought some extra weapons and added them to some he already had—to become a mass murderer. But I believe it was only recently that he decided that his victims would be the people attending this particular concert. He booked the room accordingly, which would have been no problem given his relationship with the hotel. The festival concert had to have been advertised in advance, and it represented the perfect opportunity for him.
This became my theory quite soon after first hearing some of the details, and I’ve seen nothing so far to change my mind. Of course, my mind could change if some evidence against this theory were to be revealed, but so far it has not. In fact, a few moments ago I read something that backed the theory up (if the report is true, of course), at least to my way of thinking:
Police are investigating the possibility that Las Vegas mass murderer Stephen Paddock may have originally targeted another music festival in the city.
Paddock had apparently attempted to book rooms at the Ogden, a luxury condo tower that overlooked the Life is Beautiful open-air festival, which ran across 15 Las Vegas blocks from September 22-24.
He requested specific suites at the Ogden and another unidentified hotel, but moved on when he discovered they were booked, an inside source told CBS.
That raises the grim possibility that he’d intended to turn either location into sniper nests, like the one he built in the Mandalay Bay hotel on Sunday, prior to his horrific killing spree.
This doesn’t surprise me in the least. I believe that any festival, or any gathering, that was to take place under the high windows of any hotel with good sightlines would have suited Paddock’s needs.
As for why Paddock wanted to become a mass murderer in the first place, I believe that (unless an autopsy locates some organic cause such as a brain tumor in an area that deals with aggression and/or judgment) he was a psychopath like his father before him, and ultimately became an even more violent one. His father was a psychopath of the con man variety; he’s usually been described as a bank robber but that was just one of his many modi operandi (I may write more about the father in another post). Not all psychopaths are violent by any means, and I think Paddock was a relatively law-abiding one—until he wasn’t. As commenter “FunkyPhD” wrote:
I suspect that the more we learn about Paddock, the more we’ll find out that he was just a sociopathic, black-hearted nihilist, who wanted his suicide to be spectacular. He served no ideology, was checked by no transcendental beliefs, and had no children or parents [NOTE added: except that Paddock had an elderly mother and some brothers and their kids] or friends or family to shame. He was tired of life, which was easy for him, and”“like Oswald”“bitter that the world failed to exalt him for his genius, and was therefore determined to punish his fellow human creatures for their indifference. He wasn’t in pain, or in despair, or even lashing out for some unforgivable injury or slight. As Dostoyevski so brilliantly showed, when there is no meaning or purpose or duty or responsibility, destruction of the human community is not only permissible, it is also the ultimate act of freedom.
I concur; or at least that’s my working theory at present.
Stephen Paddock would have been about 14 years old when Charles Whitman famously climbed that tower at the U. of Texas, and he would have been ten when Oswald blew the top of JFK’s head off in Dallas from his sniper’s nest above. These are very formative years and the incidents probably made a deep impression on Paddock (as they did on all of us at the time). He probably realized that a sniper position could keep him relatively safe and protected for a fairly long time and maximize his opportunity to kill. Although Paddock doesn’t seem to have possessed any special marksman skills, his choice of a large and densely packed target, coupled with his protected position, would be his way to achieve success in what I imagine was his desire to be the single shooter who killed the largest number number of people in a mass murder in the US.
As for the question of why Paddock had so very many firearms and so very much ammunition in the room, I believe it was because he thought he might last there a long, long time and hoped to kill a lot more people than he did. Apparently it was only 9-11 minutes before a police officer came to the door and Paddock killed himself, which I believe was much faster than he had originally predicted. He also may have had so many weapons because he felt he needed backup in case some of the weapons jammed or heated up or otherwise malfunctioned.
There are ordinarily three goals in murders such as this. The first is the one we all notice: the desire to kill large numbers of people. Sometimes the motive and targets are specific (revenge, money, politics). Sometimes—as I believe is the case with Paddock—they are not.
But there are ordinarily two additional motives. The first is to commit suicide, because in these cases the perpetrator almost certainly knows it’s unlikely he’ll escape alive and he is prepared to shoot himself before the authorities get to him. He does not want to be taken alive. And the other is to hurt one’s family—the other survivors who have to deal with the reaction of press and public, and try to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives.
[Part II will come soon, and will deal with the motives of Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower mass murderer.]
